Is political marketing new words or new practice in UK politics?

This review of the literature on political marketing and the party most associated with it in the UK, New Labour, suggests that the relationship is not straightforward. Politicians are, for example, hesitant to use marketing language in public. The relationship is problematised along the three dimensions of: partial or total import into some or all of politics; functional or instrumental use by leading politicians, and the roles of transformer of politics, or transfer agent for techniques. The results suggest two responses. The first is more fieldwork into political marketing outside of electoral campaigning and inside policy making. The second is a reconceptualising of the relationship away from the transformation or transfer dimension, and towards political marketing as a methodology for understanding a very different, and very separate activity, namely politics

Politics and public relations - should they hang together?

I argue that it is hard to distinguish between public relations and much of modern politics in the UK and that an important part of this conflation is a thoroughly bad thing. The working styles and job contents of spin doctor, lobbyist, event manager, corporate re-brander, special adviser and politician are merging, and making the distinctions of former, less presentationally conscious times harder to grasp. The merging has been given the mightiest of shoves by the behaviour of New Labour and has been much encouraged by the Mountfield Report (1998) on government communications

Can theories of power help us understand public relations better?

After thanking James Grunig for providing an architecture for thinking about public relations (PR) for 25 years, more academics should now consider questions of reassessing his formidable intellectual legacy. This seems timely, for with his retirement there is a generational change among PR thinkers and some colleagues, especially American and Australasian, have started the reassessment. I am drawn to the feasibility of putting ideas of power relations, instead of concepts of communicative symmetry, at the heart of a descriptive explanation of PR in pluralist, liberal democracies with competitive markets and vigorous civil societies. Grunig’s paradigm has turned the academic gaze too quickly towards communication studies. The task is to turn it, instead, to political studies, particularly towards pluralism and interest intermediation

La importancia de la magnitud de las protestas del movimiento Occupy: el caso de una protesta local como instrumento de comunicación mediante las Relaciones Públicas y los Medios Sociales

This paper explores the persuasive communications (public relations and branding through social media) of a micro Occupy event, namely a nine-day appearance of the global protest movement at Bournemouth University (BU), on the south coast of the UK. It reflects on how student and town protesters used digital and social media in comparison to the wider and more successful UK movement. It interviews the student leader, and asks questions about the role social networks like Occupii.org played in formulating communication strategies as well as how they integrated with more popular social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. The conclusions coming from our micro case study suggest that without a supportive geographic and civic location; clear and focused messages, and robust strategic communication planning and execution, Occupy events will remain very small

The importance of scale in Occupy movement protests: a case study of a local Occupy protest as a tool of communication through Public Relations and Social Media

This paper explores the persuasive communications (public relations and branding through social media) of a micro Occupy event, namely a nine-day appearance of the global protest movement at Bournemouth University (BU), on the south coast of the UK. It reflects on how student and town protesters used digital and social media in comparison to the wider and more successful UK movement. It interviews the student leader, and asks questions about the role social networks like Occupii.org played in formulating communication strategies as well as how they integrated with more popular social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. The conclusions coming from our micro case study suggest that without a supportive geographic and civic location; clear and focused messages, and robust strategic communication planning and execution, Occupy events will remain very small